SMART MED: AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF MEDITERRANEAN SMART CITIES CREATIVENESS

The 2050 United Nation scenarios underline that three-quarter of the world population will live in urban areas, either megalopolis or peaceful provincial towns. Growing urbanization, sustainable development, digital challenge, users’ involvement, cultural and economic attractiveness, governance, are the basis of competition among European cities. A smart city is a major evolution in key supportive of a creative city. In it, citizens can express their potential in various fields of human activity supporting the networks of relationships between universities, industry, government, and enhancing the intangible values, such as sociability, solidarity and talent. In the European Smart Cities ranking (Giffinger, 2007), the Mediterranean port cities lie almost at the bottom of the list. The evaluation involved medium-sized cities (100- 500 thousand inhabitants), with a university and a catchment area of 1.5 million people. These selective criteria justify the exclusion of some of important port cities, even if they have the characteristics suitable to be defined as "intelligent and creative." The paper aims to analyze the level of intelligence beyond the creativity of the three main Mediterranean port cities, Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona, and to better understand the gap between smart cities of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and Pacific. The methodology adopted consists of a critical review of the methods currently developed for evaluating smart cities performances and it develops a SWOT analysis of the three cities (Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona), which provides a clustering of smart cities performances.